TO: Siskiyou County Board of Supervisors
RE: Countdown To The Upcoming Wildfire Season – Time For Accountability
CC: Concerned Citizens & Others
VIA EMAIL ONLY – OPEN LETTER (may be published) – January 25th, 2025
Greetings Supervisors:
Three years ago, a wind blown wildfire coming from the west towards the town of Yreka, CA came very close to engulfing the town. Parts of the USFS fire-line broke and personnel were scrambling for their lives according to credible information from County personnel. Fortunately, CALFIRE’s lines held. How long can we rely upon luck?
Question:
When an elected body of officials is made aware, via constructive notice, of a cost-effective, science and empirical-experience supported practical solution for a deadly and costly exigent threat to it’s constituents and their lives and property, and for the wrong reasons, those elected officials fail to at the least implement a pilot test of the proposed solution, is there culpability, is there liability?Is there moral hazard?
We are certainly burning, but are we learning?
Grass and brush are primary fuels in a vast majority of deadly, costly wildfires, and also serve as the ladder fuels on the ground, delivering fire to other fuels, such as structures and forests.
This past winter (2024-2025 – ongoing), we’ve already received a record amount of precipitation, which is currently generating a record amount of flammable vegetative materials, grass & brush.
According to AI meta-data:
In 2024, Siskiyou County, California had its 21st wettest year on record, with nearly 37 inches of precipitation. This was 1.32 inches above average.December was the wettest on record in 130 years, with 3.13 inches more rain than normal. Contrary what some people may believe, and contrary to published science, 66% of ALL wildfires are primarily fueled by grass & brush, not trees or forests. And the vast majority of loss of life and hundreds of $-Billions in annual costs (property business losses) are from grass and brush fueled wildfires, NOT forest fires. And given the upward trend of loss of life, homes, business and overall costs, we may eclipse $1-Trillion in wildfire losses in this coming year.
Oregon has been throwing hundreds of $-millions in tax-dollars at supposed solutions, all of which have failed, and miserably so. The empirical evidence supporting that statement is that, even with nearly annual massive increases in spending, the wildfires in Oregon have grown worse, not better, and not even being held in check.
Results: The 2024 Oregon wildfire season was the worst ever, with approximately 1.9-million acres burned. Why? Science shows that they are not addressing the real problem. They are in the band-aid business, instead of ending the core cause of wildfires.
Thinning forests, will NOT solve the prodigious annual grass and brush problem that stems from the collapsed herbivory. The ONLY solution is the restoration of the herbivory in a manner that places the most emphasis on cost-effectiveness (ongoing long-term effect) and ecologically-economically sensible implementation.
It’s very likely that the collapsed herbivory is the fault of California Dept. of Fish & Wildlife’s mismanagement and reckless monetization of our deer and elk populations. They fail to conduct regular and accurate (audited) census of cervids, which is absolutely required for proper management and hunting quotas.
Selling deer and elk hunting tags and thereby increasing the human predation upon the cervid populations already in collapse is just ridiculous and demonstrates that hubris and greed have overcome logic and common sense in our government agencies. This MUST end.
Lets Review What Has Failed For the Past Decades to Reduce Catastrophic Grass and Brush Fires & Why:
“Forest fires may get more attention, but a new study reveals that grassland fires are more widespread and destructive across the United States. Almost every year since 1990, the study found, grass and shrub fires burned more land than forest fires did, and they destroyed more homes, too.”
~ NYT
We needn’t look far to see the recent empirical truth of the foregoing statement (*denotes grass and brush fueled wildfire)
*2025 Los Angeles Fires:
AI meta-data report: “According to recent estimates, the Los Angeles wildfires have caused over $250 billion in damages, with the potential to reach $275 billion, making it one of the costliest natural disasters in US history; the fires are reported to have damaged or destroyed around 17,027 structures, including homes and businesses, across the affected areas.”
*McKinney Fire – The McKinney Fire in Northern California and Southern Oregon in 2022 destroyed at least 118 homes and 185 structures in total. The fire also destroyed the Klamath River Community Hall and a building that housed Karuk tribe archives.*Lahaina Fire (102 dead, 2,200 structures burned)
*Mill Fire (118 homes destroyed)
*Marshall Fire (1,084 homes burned)
*Camp Fire (85 People died, deadliest in CA History with 18,000 structures burned)
*Sonoma Fires – On the night of October 8, 2017, a historic wind event led to one of the worst firestorms in Sonoma County history, followed by almost three weeks of fire. In total, the Nuns, Tubbs, and Pocket Fires (together comprising the Sonoma Complex Fire) burned over 110,700 acres in Sonoma and Napa counties. 24 lives were lost as a result of the fires. 6,997 structures were destroyed, resulting in direct losses exceeding $7.8 billion (CA Insurance Commissioner).

*Alameda Fire – The Almeda Fire in Oregon destroyed at least 2,357 structures, including over 600 homes, on September 8, 2020. The fire also damaged over 2,500 homes and 600 businesses.
First, we must all understand, accept and make-use of the now well-known settled-science:
Grass and Brush wildfires are the elephant in the room, not forest fires.
Why are Grass & Brush wildfires the so-called ‘elephant in the room’?
1. Grass and Brush wildfires represent approximately 66% of all wildfires over the past 35-years, according to a recent published study.

And if we compare the graph above showing increase in grass & brush fires, to the graph below showing the collapse of the cervid (deer) population in California, the inverse correlation is very very clear… when we lose of herbivores, catastrophic wildfire evolves, and has evolved.


The deer population has continued it’s collapse in CA since 2016, to the present. Current population estimates suggest less than 400,000 deer in the entire state of California. Today there is just one deer for every 250-acres in CA. Just 65 years ago, there was one deer for every 46-acres, if we use candy-coated data. Many hunting guides I have spoken with, who have a lifetime of experience, suggest there are far less deer and elk than are even being reported by State officials.
2. Grass and Brush fueled wildfires cause far more loss of life and economic damages (not including suppression costs) than forest fires. The Los Angeles fires have already eclipsed $250-Billion in economic damages. In 2017, Courthouse News reported that wildfires in CA caused approx. $180-Billion in total losses. A vast majority of those wildfires were fueled by grass & brush, not forests.

3. Published peer-reviewed Studies show that restoring the herbivory (using species that consume grass and brush) will reduce the frequency, size and intensity of catastrophic grass and brush wildfires. https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rstb.2017.0443
It’s a fact that forest fires are a serious problem, and logging makes sense when done right. But, according to all the empirical data from wildfire forensic reports, InciWeb, published scientific studies and Insurance Industry Data, Grass and Brush fueled wildfires are the biggest problem we face by a very large margin.
3. We Know How To Reduce Grass & Brush Wildfires.
We also now know what didn’t and won’t work cost-effectively at-scale and why.
a. Prescribed Fire (aka: RxFire and Controlled Fire):
RxFire is NOT scalable onto the hundreds of millions of acres in western states requiring annual grass and brush fuels management. It’s not even scalable or guaranteed safe for use on thousands of acres. And it doesn’t matter whose doing the burning (BLM, USFS, Indigenous) as experience shows. Facts how that the risks of using RxFire far outweigh any benefits, and in fact, cause harm to soils, native seed banks, watersheds, and ecosystems, including flora and fauna. And that’s because the use of Rxfire on landscapes with abnormal (unnatural) fuel loads stemming from a collapsed herbivory burns so hot, it damages the ecosystem. Study from DRI:
And using RxFire on landscapes with excessive fuels damages the ecosystem, according to many studies, and is cited in recent U.S. Forest Service (USFS) and Bureau of Land Management (‘BLM’) Resource Management Plans (‘RMPs) as a issue of concern, limiting any proposed use of RxFire only after ‘pretreatment’ of fuels (very costly).
More here on impacts of RxFire:
The costs incurred by loss of lives, homes and businesses from using Prescribed Fire over the last decade has been in the $-Billions. The recent experience with RxFire in New Mexico fully supports this observation. Report Here:
Added to all the foregoing, a recent UCLA Study shows that toxins in wildfire smoke (includes RxFire) is killing thousands of Californians each year, and over their 10-year Study, ~55,000 Californians died prematurely and the economic loss from that was about $435-Billion.
https://e360.yale.edu/digest/wildfire-smoke-deaths-california
b. Mowing, mulching and bio-massing: The simple truth is that limited access to remote vacant wild-lands and rugged terrain, radically reduce any areas suited to this treatment, and is nevertheless time consuming and costly, and here again, is required annually.
c. Proposed use of herbicides: It almost goes without saying that using chemicals in remote wilderness is begging for an ecological disaster on many levels, including the loss of soils stabilization by grass and brush, which leads to catastrophic erosion and impacts on water quality and fisheries, just to start.
d. Logging and thinning forests. While thinning forests make sense for forest health, and modern ecologically sensible logging must be implemented in appropriate areas, it fails to address the much larger problem related to managing Grass and Brush.
What Does Work?
We can and must reestablish the herbivory in the order that is expedient and logical:
1. We have 70,000 publicly-owned wild horses languishing in off-range holding corrals (feed lots). These horses are castrated and sterilized (non-breeding). These horses are currently costing taxpayers about $150-Million/year to feed … grass.
These horses (any number from 1 to a 1,000) are available to ANY government body (town, city, state, county fire dept, etc.) via the ‘Humane Transfer of Excess Animals Act’. The law allows these horses to be taken and used as ‘work animals’ under the existing Law. And using them for wildfire fuels management in the appropriate vacant lands is work.
The details of how that Law would work to get these important herbivores located into remote vacant wild-land areas, not suited for cattle, sheep or goats, was covered by two lawyers who are known experts in this Law. HERE:
Legal Path To Rewilding Horses Under H.R. 1625:
Geldings and sterilized mares from this path (#1) are gentle-giants and just want to eat and nap under a tree. As such, can provide fire fuel breaks in the hills around urban areas unsuited for goats, sheep or cattle due to predators (wolves, cougars and coyotes). They are easily confined with standard ranch fencing, while is the only relevant cost other than provision of a water trough.
2. In grazing areas where wild horses commingled with production livestock, and/or are deemed in conflict with commercial enterprises (grazing leases) on certain public lands managed by the Bureau of Land Management or the U.S. Forest Service, and where said wild horses are being targeted for roundups;
Instead spending tens of $-millions on expensive roundups and expensive long term holding fees levied on taxpayers, a fraction of existing roundup costs could be used to work with local, boots-on-the-ground wild horse nonprofit groups to engage-in bait-trapping the horses as family units. And then humanely relocating them away from areas of economic conflict, and rewilding them into remote vacant wild-lands, unsuited for cattle, sheep or goats (predators, terrain, etc.) where they will do what they do best… reduce and cost-effectively manage grass and brush wildfire fuels. This process saves taxpayers hundreds of $-millions annually right off the top. And the reductions in wildfire fuels results in additional savings from reducing the frequency, size and intensity of grass and brush fires.
More in this ABC NEWS video:
ABC NEWS Medford:

Here are a few important 2-min videos for your consideration… Please watch them…
1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XEFEzq47Xmw
2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yRUNFYgiSnc
3. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sr-Y9kcSRbA
4. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XFAK798pgGw
Respectfully Submitted,
William E. Simpson II Founder – Exec. Director – Wild Horse Fire Brigade
Ethologist – Author – Conservationist
Wild Horse Ranch
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